Hello! Just about running out of time now, so I’m not going to write much today. It’s been an up-and-down week, but I’ve taken two days off and things feels fine again. At least, as fine as can be right now. Are you doing okay? I’m here if you’d like to talk about something, or just vent. My email inbox is always open to you.
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1. Write a rapid prototype first - Terence Tao’s blog
Terence Tao is a phenomenal mathematician, and his blog is very good too. Not only does he post about math-y stuff, but he also writes about other things that are very accessible. In this post he talks about his approach to writing scientific papers where he first creates a “rapid prototype” similar to what you would do when writing software. As someone who has written/co-written a few papers so far, this is very good advice and a great system.
2. The accidental beekeeper - Aeon
This was a nice and refreshing piece where the author, Helen Jukes, talks about her experience with learning about and even keeping bees.
I experienced waves of protectiveness towards these tiny newcomers; felt unexpected upsurges of care. Getting a window on the interior life of another creature is a curious experience, and the bees unsettled me, they upturned my usual ways of seeing and going about the world. I began noticing other nonhuman life in the city, and all those wildflower meadows and riverways I’d missed at first. […] I suppose I’d imagined that having a hive in my garden might offer an escape from the human world, with all its stressors and strains. In fact, the colony opened me out, led me into a new understanding of the world and my place in it. I began thinking about landscape differently, and about relationship differently, and language.
3. This study on “accidents involving flowers” is the most beautiful thing I’ve read during the pandemic - Vox
So nice! And wholesome. This piece is about a recent study published in the journal New Phytologist about how flowers (technically flowerstalks) recover or react when pushed over. When a plant is flowering, its top priority is to ensure that pollinating insects can access the flower. This is why a plant will reorient its flowering stalk when pushed or bent.
The paper is also a window into the balancing act of evolution. It’s reassuring to read it now, in springtime, as flowers are blooming and many of us feel like we are not. Look at blossoms, which may seem frail at first glance, and discover resilience.
4. Kendrick Lamar Thinks Like A Jazz Musician - NPR
I’m only an amateur jazz listener and have listened to almost nothing by Kendrick Lamar, but this piece was so good! It’s getting me to listen to and dive into new music and a whole new genre for me, which is quite a feat.
On the surface, DAMN. isn’t knitted to the jazz world the way Butterfly was, but Kendrick is no different than Miles, Coltrane and Herbie before him: though he’s rooted in rap, he pushes his art to unforeseen places, bending the culture to what he’s doing. Like those icons, Kendrick has an innate sense of timing and space, giving his words the same weight that they gave their notes. […] He knows when to surge forward and when to let it breathe. As a result, Kendrick is introducing jazz to a generation who might only know it through their parents’ old record collections.
5. Bibliologistics: The Nature of Books Now, or A Memorable Fancy - Post45
This is a really nice piece about books. Like, books. The physical things. The author, Matthew Kirschenbaum, proposes a new field called “bibliologistics” as follows:
“Bibliologistics is a book history of the present, one that understands that books — individually and in aggregate — leave traces in ecological, economic, and many other registers.”
After all, any author can tell you who published their book. But how many can tell you who printed it? Or where it was printed? Or where the paper and the glue came from? Or anything about the ink? What about the person who designed the cover? Who were they? Who did the copyediting? Who oversaw the color separation process? Or loaded pallets of shrinkwrapped copies into a shipping container? Or worked the machinery in the paper mill?
6. Canada is fake - The Outline
The title of this piece is clickbaity, but the article itself raises some interesting points that I hadn’t given much thought to earlier. The basic point is this:
But when I say that Canada is fake, I don’t mean anything so universal or theoretical. Canada is not an accident or a work in progress or a thought experiment. I mean that Canada is a scam — a pyramid scheme, a ruse, a heist. Canada is a front. And it’s a front for a massive network of resource extraction companies, oil barons, and mining magnates.
All this has been brought in sharp focus over the last year or so with the conflict between the Canadian state and the Wet’suwet’en nation (an Indigenous people whose land is unceded as yet to Canada). I haven’t read much (anything at all, really) about Canadian history, but this article made me want to dive into it more.
7. Tradition is Smarter Than You Are - The Scholar’s Stage
This was such an interesting essay. It talks about traditions, and why they are relevant and why every single archaic practice doesn’t need to be obliterated away just because its practitioners don’t know why they’re doing it. Some traditions are “adaptive”, and some are merely the “cultural version of genetic drift”, but without the benefit of hindsight, it is difficult to tell if a particular tradition is useful or not.
8. The prisoner’s dilemma at 70 – at what we get wrong about it - Tim Harford’s blog
Prisoner’s dilemmas do exist. The most pressing example today is climate change. Every nation and every individual benefits if others restrain their pollution, but we all prefer not to have to restrain our own. It would be foolish to hope that Tit for Tat will save the day here — and we don’t have to. We have tools available to us: domestically, taxes and regulations; internationally, treaties and alliances. Such tools change the incentives. We could and should be using them more. The pianist and his suspected accomplice were trapped. We are not. Unlike them, we can change the game.
9. How ultra-processed food took over your shopping basket - The Guardian
This piece is written by Bee Wilson, who has written Consider the Fork , one of my favorite food books of all time.
The concept of UPFs was born in the early years of this millennium when a Brazilian scientist called Carlos Monteiro noticed a paradox. People appeared to be buying less sugar, yet obesity and type 2 diabetes were going up. […] One of the biggest trends to jump out of the data was that, while the amount of sugar and oil people were buying was going down, their sugar consumption was vastly increasing, because of all of the ready-to-eat sugary products that were now available […]
To Monteiro, the bag of sugar on the kitchen counter is a healthy sign, not because sugar itself has any goodness in it, but because it belongs to a person who cooks. Monteiro’s data suggested to him that the households who were still buying sugar were also the ones who were still making the old Brazilian dishes such as rice and beans.
10. Bent into shape: The rules of tree form - Knowable Magazine
I have a weird feeling that I have shared this article sometime earlier, but who cares, it’s great and I’m going to share it again.
See you next week.-Kat.